The present invention relates to sliders, and in particular, to a slider having rounded corners and edges, and smooth surfaces for reducing particle contamination within a disc drive assembly.
Disc drive systems include disc drive suspensions for supporting sliders over information tracks of a rotatable disc. Typically, suspensions include a load beam having a mounting region on a proximal end, a flexure on a distal end, a relatively rigid region adjacent to the flexure, and a spring region between the mounting region and the rigid region. An air bearing slider is supported by the flexure. The mounting region is typically attached to a base plate for mounting the load beam to an actuator arm. A motor, which is controlled by a servo control system, rotates the actuator arm to position the slider over the desired information tracks on the disc. This type of suspension is used with both magnetic and non-magnetic discs.
A slider reads data from or writes data to each magnetic disc and is designed to fly at a certain height above the magnetic disc during operation. The slider does come into contact with the magnetic disc surface as the slider is being lifted off or landing onto the disc. The geometry of the slider includes sharp corners or edges that can cause indentations on the disc at the place of impact between the slider and the magnetic disc. This, in turn, can result in the loss of data at the point of impact.
Slider geometry also plays a role in producing hard particles that damage discs or result in ultimate failure of the disc drive. Failures result from these hard particles entering into the head-disc interface and either scratching the magnetic media or embedding into the disc. One prominent source for these particles is the slider itself. The fabrication process for sliders includes slicing and dicing operations that leave corners and edges rough, cracked, and laden with hard particles.
In the field of disc drives, ceramic (hard) particles are a major source of damage to sliders and the disc media. Cleaning has been the primary method for hard particle removal, but cleaning weakens the grain boundaries and causes more particles to be freed. Some prior systems have tried to minimize particles by cleaning of the suspension assembly in an aqueous or solvent system, but have not succeeded because the particle reduction eventually plateaus. Other systems use glob-top encapsulants to minimize particles, but such encapsulants are not useful in a drive environment due to contamination issues and microactuator stroke reduction.
Various slider designs address the problem of hard particle contamination, but they all have shortcomings that limit the effectiveness and practicability of their methodology. Many designs increase the complexity of designing and fabricating the slider, while other designs are unable to sufficiently reduce the level of hard particle contamination. Therefore, those prior designs do not present ideal hard particle contamination solutions.
More recent slider designs employ complicated methods that utilize polishing pads, wire assisted polishing, radiation coating, and chamfered cuts to produce rounded corners and edges and also to reduce hard particle contamination. An inexpensive treatment that smooths the diced surfaces and rounds corners and edges, and also fits into the existing slider manufacturing process, is needed in the art. The existing art does not include a method for fabricating a slider with rounded corners, edges, and smooth surfaces through a polishing process that incorporates a polymeric fiber and a free abrasive slurry of submicron particles.